And yet, there were only two bathtubs in third class.

I have a couple of new buzzwords for you…   get a pen…  ready?   “Reverse Outsourcing”.  Better get familiar with it as the talking heads on T. V. and the vendors of free birdcage liners will be using it a lot in the next few months.

Reverse outsourcing is the return of jobs to the U. S. from countries outside of the U. S., most notably India.

It was a long running joke about U. S. going overseas because of wage concerns and available labor for IT/support positions.  The internet was rife with You-Tube videos of tech support phone calls going to India based concerns where the operator at the other end was also selling Amway products to a man in Virginia, telling a screaming woman that she had just won a free trip to a time-share in the same town that she lived in and was providing marital counseling to a couple from Germany.  All at the same time.

U.S. companies poured billions of dollars into India neighbor hoods in Bengaluru (also known as Bangalore), Mumbai (also known as Bombay), and Delhi…   also known as Delhi. 

What is interesting is that those companies that we outsourced labor to in the late 1990’s and early 2000 are sending jobs back to the U.S. in the form of on-site pre-sales support, situational site assessment and local hands-on technical support.  Companies in India are setting up store fronts in the U. S. and hiring Americans to do the job locally.

Only it’s not just India.  It’s Japan, Germany and China as well.  While one of our closest neighbors, Mexico, is still a ways from making this giant leap, there are rumblings of a few major “south of the border” companies that could be taping the American workforce for development of trade in the financial investment market that benefits Mexican companies while providing employment for U. S. citizens.

Well?  Why not?

It’s painfully obvious that the American way of doing business is crap.  We can’t even keep our auto makers out of bankruptcy trouble.  Of course, maybe the question has to be “Why should we?”

Most of the U. S. investment firms have a whole chapter in their training guides on how to run an elaborate and effective “ponzi” scheme and steer clear of the S.E.C.  The government is making damn sure they have some interest in the running of our banking systems, manufacturing systems, sports franchises and they are more than willing to dish out the ideas of having foreign investors take stake in some our largest Fortune 500 companies.

This begs the following statement;  we are failing as a country in providing for ourselves.  We will have to rely on those good folks who speak funny languages to keep the U. S. workforce from committing hari-kiri over the fact that they have been laid off.

There is no doubt in my mind that very soon, we will see a Ta-Ta motors dealership in the U. S. within a few short years.  For those who don’t know, Ta-Ta motors is the largest car company in India.  Only these cars from India get way better gas mileage than our U. S. gas guzzlers do by running a mixture of fuel oil, turpentine and perfume.  It’s not really smog they send out the tailpipes, but it sure do smell nice.  Oh, and they can fit two Ta-Ta cars in the same parking space that a Ford Lincoln fits in.  (There is a joke about two ta-ta’s jammed together in there somewhere, but I’m not going in that direction…).

So reverse outsourcing will now become the norm for awhile.  We will start hearing a lot about it over the next couple of years.  We will start to see companies take over major metro business complexes and plaster names we can hardly pronounce right up there at the top of the mark.  There’s even talk of renaming Yankee Stadium to Bharat Sanchar Nigham Limited Field.  Hell, Honda’s developmental racing engine, which now provides all of the engines being used in U. S. open wheel racing that’s right, not one American made engine is used in this American Icon of Racing), has petitioned the Indy 500 raceway (the Old Brickyard) to being called Motegi Ring One West.

It’s going to happen.  And maybe that’s a good thing.  If you look on the bright side, those players involved in the business of business in India have a hard and fast rule about executives screwing up and thinking only of themselves.  It usually involves some type of ritual of taking the executive outside behind the barn and shooting his a$$, followed by public humiliation of him AND his family.  There is a good possibility that U. S. Exec’s may start to get a clue about how to handle their American business and not have it just effect their pocket books.  If they don’t, the American people could rise up and adopt a methodology that emulates the ways of those thriving companies overseas.  Sending that clown that blew up Countrywide mortgage (and allowed over 160,000 people to loose their homes) to that Federal Penitentiary Resort and Golf Club in Tallahassee Florida is a down right embarrassment is you ask me.

We are a smart people.  In fact, some of us got so smart that we figured out “how to ruin the U. S. business model” that built the American Economy into a pillar of security and wealth.  But the “Me-Me-Me syndrome… at all costs” that upper level business executives have now ingrained into today’s business plan is killing us as a society and who we are as a people.

I’m telling you, Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan have got to be turning over in their graves right about now.  I can foresee a new educational degree coming out of the colleges soon.  Bachelor’s of Ignoring the limits of Risk Taking degree and the new Doctorate of Fleecing the American people degree.

Can it be fixed?  I don’t think there is any way that the American economy will ever recover from all of this.  How can I say that?  Well, if one looks at the broad picture, and I am talking about the whole U. S. economic picture, we, as a people, have lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.6 trillion dollars of our “actual wealth”.  That’s 2,600,000,000,000.  You don’t even want to know the amount of “perceived wealth” that has been lost over the last two years.

All I can say is that it’s a lot a freakin’ zeros…

I guess you could look at it this way.  If the Titanic had a few more bath tubs, and if there had been a way to move those tubs out of third class, there might have been enough life boats and bath tubs so that a few more people could have been saved.  If we could get Taiwan to send us a couple of billion bath tubs (after all, that’s where they are made today), the U. S. could fall off the end of the earth and some of use will still remain afloat.

Sadly, we may be seeing a period of time when history repeats itself and the good ship called the “Mighty U. S. of A.” will slowly slide beneath the waves of business and political idiocy.

Until next week…